Taner Akçam is a Turkish historian and sociologist, and the Chair of Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark University. He was imprisoned for political speech while still a university student in Ankara, and in 1976 was adopted as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. After receiving political asylum in Germany, he earned a PhD from the University of Hanover. Akçam is widely recognised as one of the first Turkish scholars to write extensively on the Ottoman-Turkish genocide of the Armenians in the early 20th century. He has published more than ten books on the Armenian genocide and Turkish nationalism, in several languages. These include A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (Metropolitan Books, 2006); Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials, co-written with Vahakn Dadrian (Berghahn Books, 2011); and The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton University Press, 2012), which won the MESA Albert Hourani Book Award for 2013 and was listed as one of the best books of 2012 on the Middle East by Foreign Affairs.